Protection of data stored on various storage media is an increasingly important technical requirement. For example, it is important to movie distributors that digital copies cannot readily be made of DVD's. As the capacity of writeable digital optical storage media and other writable storage media increases and compression techniques improve, making high quality copies of movies distributed on DVD is becoming an increasing threat to the bottom lines of movie distributors.
Currently, DVD copy protection relies on various encryption techniques that have been breached. In fact, there is software available to easily copy DVDs on personal computers today. Studios and distributors have increasingly relied on legal restrictions on copying and reverse engineering of encryption systems to replace the limited technical level of protection achieved by encryption systems. Certainly, it would be helpful if data protection schemes could be engineered to provide better protection of valuable data.